Last year, Raymond Burse, the now permanent president of Kentucky State University, took a stand against income inequality and voluntarily asked for a $90,125 pay cut. The amount he gave back to the school equaled a quarter of his $349,869 salary. Burse took this step with the intention of making sure that 24 minimum wage workers on campus were paid a living wage. Burse made the decision to reduce his salary all on his own, moreover – no campus movements led to his action, only his conscience and profound sense of academic stewardship. “I figured it was easier for me to forgo that amount, rather than adding an additional burden on the institution,” Burse says.

To many of us, this is exactly what our universities and colleges are expected to do: stand up for good ideas. Our universities were the starting place for movements that ended the Vietnam War, gave birth to environmentalism and fostered a storied list of advancements that we now take for granted as part of the informed society we know today. Over the past few decades however, colleges have increasingly adopted the narrow imperatives of profit-maximizing corporations, and these changes often fly under the radar of the general public. This move is often referred to as the “corporatization of higher education.”

One such change is the arrival within college payrolls of runaway executive compensation, a development that tacitly endorses and actively helps create the record income inequality we see around us nationwide. To illustrate this point one need look no further than demoralizing data gleaned from institutional research and IRS990 forms publicly released by Macalester College. Macalester is often ranked as one of the most progressive colleges in America. However as the graph below makes clear, our reputation for visionary governance is increasingly a thing of the past.

Over the past nine years, pay for the most senior and highest-paid Macalester staff members (7-9 employees including the president, the vice presidents, and deans), has increased 19% adjusted for inflation – an increase from $250,494 to $298,215 on average. The leading salary increase within this group is of course that taken by the college president, who has enjoyed a 55% real pay increase in the period. The president’s total compensation of $354,601 when he started (a year earlier than the graph shows) has more than doubled, sitting at $792,169

in 2013 when combined with benefits and deferred pay. These extraordinary increases have occurred against an economic backdrop including the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s. Yet, these pay increases were not enjoyed by all Macalester employees, in fact the discrepancies in raises have caused the total share of the salary pie going to senior staff (as opposed to everyone else) to increase by at least 40% since 2002.

One such group not enjoying the same raises given to executives were full-time teaching professionals, whose pay has all but completely stagnated with an increase of a meager 2.5% over the same nine years: from $110,475 to $113,228 in constant 2013 dollars. Clearly, with executive pay outpacing teachers whose average compensation has stood still, inequality at Macalester is rising in a fashion similar to that of corporations.

Macalester financial data has a way of obscuring the worst of these changes. One method is the data released about its lowest paid workers. Macalester reports the salaries of various staff positions for last year through a “staff pay band structure.” The lowest paid Macalester staff member under this method is compensated at a minimum salary of $28,560 (data that does not account for part-time adjunct faculty who are known to be paid much less than this). Since the highest compensated employee is the president at $792,169, the ratio from highest to lowest is 27:1.

But Macalester contracts out some labor – with Bon Appetit for dining services, American Security and its bookstore the Highlander. So while Macalester gets to say they pay their staff at a minimum of $14.17 an hour, this relieves them of having their books reflect the fact that Bon Appetit pays its employees minimum wage. As shown on the graph, including subcontractor pay pushes the ratio between highest and lowest paid workers at Macalester from 27:1 in 2004 to 53:1 in 2013.

Hopefully at this point you are persuaded of rising inequality at Macalester College. But you may be thinking: we’re only talking about the salaries of 9 staff members, right? These pay increases have in reality consumed hundreds of thousands of dollars from the school budget. If senior staff salaries had remained at their 2002 share of the payroll budget in 2013, Macalester would have an additional $694,115 in the annual budget. Those raises alone amount to more than $334 of your tuition dollars each year.

That money could pay for 17 full-time counselors to aid student mental health care. It could be used to increase adjunct pay from $6,200 per class on average to around $8,700 per class. It could increase the wages of on-campus employees so, like the example at Kentucky State University, nobody who works at Macalester makes minimum wage.

What is apparent is that our generous executive salary increases have not reflected the spirit of belt tightening being asked of students and families, and which surely must be better justified or rescinded before budget controlling strategies are asked of students. Macalester’s strategic plan has taken note in discrepancies between rates of growth, referred to as the “slope problem,” in which the growth rate of expenses exceeds the growth of revenue causing an unsustainable financial model. These arguments make no mention of the corporatization of pay on campus, much less that this very same slope problem is exacerbated by senior staff salaries that have increased at a rate of 7.9% a year on average, more than double the school’s 3.5% tuition revenue growth target mentioned in the same plan.

In fact, just a week ago the president sent a letter home explaining that Macalester’s tuition would increase by 3.6% for the 2015-2016 school year to a record total of $59,761 including room and board. The letter even states that one of the main reasons for the increase was “the need to recognize the outstanding work of our faculty and staff through modest compensation increases.” The issue with this wording is an implication that both groups are receiving similar raises when it is clear from the data that the compensation for faculty has stagnated on average, while the pay raises for senior staff are much less “modest.”

Suggested repairs for our “slope problem” include a 3-year residency requirement for students and cuts to study away expenditures. At the scale targeted in the strategic plan for moving to the new residency requirement, the 125-150 new beds needed could provide around $700,000-840,000 of tuition revenue yearly to the budget (not taking into account any resulting costs, such as construction and upkeep). If executives did not take such large raises, however, this extra revenue might not even be necessary – since at least $694,115 could be saved if the share of senior staff salaries did not increase as aforementioned. Students should not be the only members of the Macalester community to pay for the new austerity, especially when a fundamental “slope problem” of the budget is exemplified by these executive salaries.

We need to put higher education back on track for promoting sensible financial leadership. The first step is to control the corporatization process that allows this divergence of school revenue into the one percent, who are now on track to possess the majority of the world’s wealth. Since our tuition dollars allow Macalester to operate, students are stakeholders in the path Macalester takes going forward. Let’s make sure it’s one that doesn’t contribute to the unsustainable, ultimately destabilizing and socially damaging inequality epidemic.